Harmattan was supposed to ship in fall of 2010. It's a year late.
Yet, even if the MeeGo mess hadn't happened and Nokia had shipped a Harmattan phone on the original Maemo schedule, would it have made any difference? It would have been hamstrung by Nokia's confusion over Symbian's direction, and steamrolled by iOS and Android just the same.
It's not Elop's fault that Nokia's software is in shambles. The damage was done years earlier.
Put yourself in Elop's shoes when he arrived a year ago. There's Symbian, an OS that has become extremely expensive to develop. It has been open-sourced and modernized at great effort, but the resulting product (Symbian^3) has critical bugs and a lackluster UI. The people in charge tell him that the big leap forward is just around the corner... But apparently that's exactly what they were saying two years earlier.
Then there's MeeGo, a Linux variant that used to be one VP's hobby project. Recently it has been promoted to become the company's new flagship -- except that nobody is quite clear on how it should be positioned alongside Symbian. There's a powerful Symbian lobby inside the company that's determined to see the "eternal upstart" MeeGo fail. The technical state of the OS doesn't inspire much confidence either: the UI framework has been reset several times in the past few years, so although they have a sprawling Linux distribution, there isn't really a phone UI yet. "Don't worry," say the people in charge, "this latest framework is so great that we'll whip up a smartphone experience in no time!"
Faced with these options and all their internal political baggage, is it any wonder that Elop went looking for an operating system outside the company?
Dumping Symbian made a lot of sense. Replacing it with MeeGo seemed like a decent idea, but it was never clear if MeeGo was really ready to replace it (thought early reviews of the N9 made it look promising at least), and Nokia wasn't ready to dump Symbian. Ditching both for something else was a hard call, but probably wasn't the wrong one.
But, why announce when he did. The chosen OS wasn't out at the time, and Nokia had just gotten ready to ship their shiny new MeeGo flagship as well as a handful of new Symbian handsets. That announcement basically made all these new devices worthless. He could have at least kept the announcement silent for 6 months and see if the phones gained any traction. You can argue that they wouldn't have, but at least their sales numbers would have looked better. His timing was terrible; HP terrible.
And why WP? The OS wasn't finished and was missing some pretty basic features when it finally was launched. As countless people have said already, Android would have made a lot more sense here. They could have customized it and potentially even brought Symbian apps over and it had the added advantage of already having a solid foothold in the market.
I never got to understand all that maemo, symbian, meego operating system differences. Couldn't they just use linux and get some QML frontend in front of it. It seems really a lack of direction/duplication of efforts.
Well, it was their strategy all along with Qt, but it's been slow ride. Everything is Qt on new Symbian, MeeGo and upcoming Meltemi. Qt is natively on the new BBX and will probably be on Android. Qt is also their main strategy besides WP, so we will see how things pan out.
If I'm correct, the Qt Lighthouse is integrated in Qt 4.8 (now RC1), which means easy porting for any platform, including Android. Remains to be seen if Nokia and Google come in terms with this officially though. Of course, you can already distribute Qt apps on Android, using third party ports like Necessitas: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/ .
Yet, even if the MeeGo mess hadn't happened and Nokia had shipped a Harmattan phone on the original Maemo schedule, would it have made any difference? It would have been hamstrung by Nokia's confusion over Symbian's direction, and steamrolled by iOS and Android just the same.
It's not Elop's fault that Nokia's software is in shambles. The damage was done years earlier.
Put yourself in Elop's shoes when he arrived a year ago. There's Symbian, an OS that has become extremely expensive to develop. It has been open-sourced and modernized at great effort, but the resulting product (Symbian^3) has critical bugs and a lackluster UI. The people in charge tell him that the big leap forward is just around the corner... But apparently that's exactly what they were saying two years earlier.
Then there's MeeGo, a Linux variant that used to be one VP's hobby project. Recently it has been promoted to become the company's new flagship -- except that nobody is quite clear on how it should be positioned alongside Symbian. There's a powerful Symbian lobby inside the company that's determined to see the "eternal upstart" MeeGo fail. The technical state of the OS doesn't inspire much confidence either: the UI framework has been reset several times in the past few years, so although they have a sprawling Linux distribution, there isn't really a phone UI yet. "Don't worry," say the people in charge, "this latest framework is so great that we'll whip up a smartphone experience in no time!"
Faced with these options and all their internal political baggage, is it any wonder that Elop went looking for an operating system outside the company?